


Rita, Bob, and Mary Sue

by paraTactician



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Multi, Sibling Incest, Threesome - F/F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-08
Updated: 2011-08-08
Packaged: 2017-10-22 09:29:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,442
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/236590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paraTactician/pseuds/paraTactician
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rose needs peace and quiet to get on with her writing.</p><p>You'd think that'd be easy in the limitless void of deep space, but no.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rita, Bob, and Mary Sue

**Author's Note:**

> I wanted to celebrate reaching the half-way mark in my preposterous AU megafic [Strider's Edge](http://archiveofourown.org/works/225382/chapters/341275) ('what the Hell does this jackass think he's doing? Marjorie, call the police' - _London Review of Books_ ) by writing something a bit different, and returning at least to the fringes of canon.
> 
> So this one's for all my fellow Dave/Rose/Terezi shippers out there!
> 
> All my...
> 
> ...fellow...
> 
> *stray sheets of newsprint skitter across the concrete in a faint breeze*
> 
> ...guys? Hello?

Rose Lalonde’s eyes were still filmy with sleep as she padded downstairs from what she supposed she must now call her bedroom, although that semantic unit carried with it a freight of suggestions and associations, none of which were in this case all that appropriate. Comfort, for one. Safety, for another. Even privacy was out of the equation. There were many rooms on this Godforsaken asteroid, but the vast majority were jammed wall-to-wall with decrepit computer equipment too broken to use and too heavy to shift, and only a few could be pressed into service for domestic purposes. As such they’d all had to double up. Rose didn’t actually mind this particularly; she was paired with Jade, who was hardly a difficult room-mate once you convinced her to stop talking and go to sleep. Apparently Dave was having a similar problem with John. Some of the trolls, as was the trollish way, tended to kick up a fuss: Karkat and Sollux never stopped bitching about every conceivable aspect of the other’s sleeping preferences. Rose felt she’d got off lightly, and yet there was a part of her that hungered for solitude. Spending years of her life with no company but her own had left her with a genuine physical craving for time to herself, a craving that made her twitchy and irritable if left unsatisfied, like a smoker trying to quit.

So she had begun a new routine. Every morning she got up early – really early, around half five in the nominal morning, although in this shadowy mechanical labyrinth time was really nothing more than a few digital displays and a reassuring collective fantasy; a religion, deserted by its god, whose adherents still went faithfully through the old routines, venerating the icons and intoning the sacred words. But it was a religion to which they all belonged, and so by leaving her bed when the green numbers said 05:30 Rose could be relatively certain of an hour, sometimes two, before anyone else began to stir. In this echoing and blessed interval she could take her laptop, find somewhere to sit, and just _be_ for a little while.

The common area was deserted, no sign of life but a few empty mugs on the table and the sorry debris of John’s latest attempt to teach Karkat Scrabble. Her laptop was where she had left it. She made a cup of Lapsang Souchong – _murder_ to alchemize, isolating the code had nearly driven Sollux into an early grave, although of course he shrugged his eventual victory off as a bagatelle and Rose had the sense not to make a performance out of her gratitude – sat down, and fired it up.

Back on Earth she would have checked Pesterchum, perhaps E-mail, but the only people she had ever needed or wanted to contact were right here on this spinning chunk of dead rock with her. So she fanned the cursor straight across to a desktop folder titled _Miscellany_. This opened up several subfolders. She navigated with the speed of long practice down a seemingly random path: through _Verbiage_ , and _Palimpsests_ , and a number of other words picked to sound dull and vaguely off-putting to roaming coolkids, into _Logorrhoea_. (With the subtle paranoia of a pyramid builder, she had placed a sub-folder one layer down called _Personal stuff_. This contained a really rather spectacular collection of files in pdf form, identified only by strings of numbers, all of which were cake recipes.) At the bottom of her descent there waited a document called _Complacency2_. She clicked twice.

It didn’t have a title yet, this one.

 _

The Cyclopean blocks of the Hall of Command were cool and oleaginously smooth beneath the bare feet of Novitiate Violetta as she strode like a whisper through the vast silence. She was grateful for the courtesy. Somewhere deep in their chilly veins she fancied she could still feel the distant, sluggish heartbeat of the mountains from which they had been ripped so many thousand years before, a pulse as physical and comforting as a heavy hand on her shoulder, filling her with a measure of the rock’s own superb disdain for the flickering temporalities of quotidian existence.

_

 _Perhaps another hundred paces, another hundred kisses of pale flesh on dark and limpid stone, brought her to the foot of the great dais. She let her eyes travel like a suppliant up the black crags of its staircase until they reached the Daedalic wonder at its peak, a throne formed of languid, twisting vines and shoots frozen in a heartbeat of growth and transmuted to solid bronze. And then she was staring straight into the twin stars beneath the beetling brows of the throne’s current occupant: her Magister, the greatest wizard of the nineteen planes, Zazzerpan the Learned._

 _Stillness hung like a raindrop on a branch, beaded, and fell._

 _“fucking hell,” he said, “i have a truly ginormous-ass beard.”_

Rose blinked. Then she re-read the last sentence. Then she began, slowly, to drum the fingers of her right hand on the arm of the sofa.

After a couple of minutes’ thought, she carefully highlighted the final ten words – _ginormous-ass_ was one word, surely? – and pressed Delete. Then she sipped her tea and began to type.

When she went for a shower a couple of hours later she shut the laptop but left it where it was. On her return, fresh and slightly floral and towelling her hair, she found no-one in the common area but Dave and Terezi, sitting at the table, drinking coffee and playing cards.

“Good morning Kanaya!” Terezi chirped.

“Good morning,” Rose replied. “I’m afraid I borrowed her shower gel again.”

Terezi tutted. “You just do it to make my life difficult. Come on, coolkid, hurry up.”

“I’m thinking,” Dave said impatiently.

“What are you playing?”

“Cheat.”

Rose gave this due consideration.

“You can’t possibly be playing Cheat. Cheat is a game whose functionality depends almost entirely on the presence of more than two players. If you play Cheat against one other person you know exactly what they have in their hand at all times.”

“Exactly,” said Terezi, and flashed one of her magnificently terrible grins. “Makes it _much_ more fun.”

There was a small pile of cards face-down between them. Dave extracted a single card from his hand, reached over, and placed it with great precision on the pile.

“One Queen,” he said.

“Cheat,” said Terezi.

Dave, who had not even bothered to take his hand away, flipped the top card over with the edge of a finger. It was the Queen of Hearts.

Terezi exhaled. “Oh well.” She swept the pile towards her and started distributing the new cards into her hand.

“I think I see,” said Rose. “The point is no longer to work out what the other players are holding. The point is simply to determine whether or not your opponent is cheating.”

“Yes!” said Terezi, sounding really pleased, as if Rose had just solved a hard puzzle. “If I have two Kings, then I know Dave also has two Kings. So if he played three Kings he would obviously be cheating. There’s no skill in that, it’s just counting. But if he plays two Kings, I can’t prove anything. They could be two Kings; they could be two twos; they could be a King and an eight.”

“So you guess.”

“I don’t _guess._ I pay attention. I listen, and sniff.” She grinned again. “When we started I got him every time. But he’s getting clever now.”

“Oh please,” said Dave. “I took pity on you for the first few games. Like a proud daddy teaching his little girl to play chess. Good move, sweetheart, you took a pawn! Daddy’s in trouble now! Except he could ruin your shit in like eighteen different ways with his bishop, and leave you a crippled wreck bleeding all over your little gingham frock.”

“Dave, as ever, I can only admire the vicious, predatory speed with which you dragged a fleeing chess analogy down into the swamps of peculiar incestuous child-rape fantasy,” said Rose. “Truly, even your issues have issues. Have either of you seen my laptop around the place?”

“Nope,” said Dave.

“I think it was over on the sofa earlier,” said Terezi.

Rose made sure to turn and look. “Oh, yes! I’m sorry, how stupid of me. I forgot I’d left it there. Thank you, Terezi.”

“A six,” said Dave.

“Cheat,” said Terezi.

“God _damn_ it,” said Dave, turning over the Jack of Diamonds.

* * *

Glancing up to check the other two were engrossed in their game, Rose opened up the laptop and navigated back to _Complacency2_. She read back over the morning’s work, in which a long and rather allusive consultation between Zazzerpan and his prize student had culminated in a decision to send Violetta, disguised as an itinerant scrivener, to the mysterious village of Ravenglass in order to unearth the truth behind certain nefarious rituals being performed on the hills nearby. The final section described a group of local ruffians becoming suspicious of Violetta’s expensive clothes and crystalline vowel-sounds and threatening her with sundry cudgels and kitchen implements. Rose was looking forward to the next part, in which the young sorceress would unleash but a fraction of the true arcane power at her disposal, with bloody and elaborately-described results.

 _

“We don’t much like your sort around ‘ere,” grunted a heavily-bearded hominid Violetta deduced from basic probability had at least a ninety per cent chance of being human. He smelt like a pint of cheap ale that had been poured down a storm drain. Behind him his retinue snickered and scratched and fondled their assortment of crudely-wrought phallic substitutes.

_

 _“I imagine my personal hygiene alone drives you into private ecstasies of shame,” replied Violetta politely._

 _“Mouthy little bitch, you’ll get what’s comin’ to yer – ”_

 _but before this dude could even move he got a kind of surprised look and both his legs fell off. there was this weird whizzing noise and suddenly all the guys with the dildos, and i mean who the fuck knew why theyd even come into ye olde tavern waving a bunch of fake cocks anyway but whatever, i guess maybe thats hot if youre a girl, were all in pieces. like little pieces, kinda finger-sized, just flying all over the fucking shop. blood went literally everywhere, there was so much goddamn blood it was unreal, whole fucking place looked like an accident at a, i dunno, a blood factory. violetta just about had time to see an incredibly awesome sillouette – fuck you spellcheck thats clearly right – with a sword, or maybe ten swords, it was hard to tell because the fucker was moving so goddamn fast. a load of other assholes in armour bust in and he killed them all too. then a dragon turned up, but he stabbed it in the face._

 _eventually everyone was dead except the barmaid, who had fallen into a coma out of sheer lust. also her top had come off somehow. violettas heart was beating wildly, like a trapped dove or some shit._

 _“my goodness, brave stranger” she said, “that was the most awesome thing ever. how the hell did you get so awesome, did you take a course or something. my name is violetta and im kind of hot in a weird ghostly malnourished way. i think i have a surname but i cant be bothered to go back and find it, lets run with raronde for the time being ok. whats your name.”_

 _“shaggy 2 dope” said the stranger, who was awesome._

Rose sat perfectly still. She could hear Dave and Terezi’s game getting progressively more excitable. Karkat had emerged from somewhere, and was calling down graphic curses on whoever had finished the cornflakes.

Her finger hovered over the Delete key. Then she smiled, a tiny private smile, and began to type.

 _

As they walked down the mud-rutted street Violetta took stock of the mysterious individual who had blundered into an otherwise perfectly manageable situation and made a lot of unnecessary mess. He was a tall young man clad mostly in black, although his waistcoat was a brilliant and ostentatious scarlet. His astonishingly pale blond hair and porcelain skin suggested his genetic code had missed albinism by the width of a helix. She would have been interested to see the colour of his eyes, but he kept them hidden behind a pair of spectacles made of some dark tinted glass. Violetta knew that compulsive concealment of the eyes generally betokened deep psychological flaws relating to insecurity and pathological introversion. She suspected from this young man’s obsessive reliance on the long, hard sword he carried at his hip – one hand constantly slipping down to toy with the rounded head of its knurled pommel, as if on nervous reflex – that they were not the only issues he had. Also, he was wearing a long black trenchcoat, and men who wore long black trenchcoats were generally of a certain type. He was, she had to admit, rather attractive, in a somewhat fragile, ephebic fashion. She imagined Shaggy 2 Dope was not his real name, but she would let him have his little secrets, at least for now.

_

 _“So, Master Dope,” she began, trying to keep the amusement from her voice, “what brings you to Ravenglass?”_

 _“An impossible quest,” he sighed. “Long ago I committed a crime so terrible, so unspeakable, that I fear it has tainted my soul forever. My sin was one of ignorance – I was misled by men I trusted – but I make no attempt to excuse it. Instead I have cast myself out from human society, and I wander this world seeking to atone in some small measure for what I have done, or if this may not be, at least to meet a brave and honourable death and thereby wash clean with my blood at least a hands-breadth of the blackness that sullies my name.”_

 _“You are penitent, then?” she asked softly._

 _“Truly penitent.” He gave her a deep, burning look, as though racked by some unimaginable inner fires. “Also brooding, and intermittently tortured.”_

 _“If you will lend me your sword-arm for a few short days,” she said, “I believe the good we may yet achieve together will bring you at least a shadow of the absolution you crave.”_

 _He fixed his shielded eyes on hers and dropped to one knee in the mud at her feet._

 _“Lady Violetta, my blade is yours,” he said passionately. “Tell me but to die for you and I shall do it.”_

 _Violetta smiled._

Rose shut the laptop and went to make herself some toast.

* * *

All day the common area was so busy with kids and trolls going to and fro that the laptop sat neglected on its cushion. Rose spent a mostly productive afternoon helping sort through electrical junk looking for working parts Sollux might be able to cannibalise. In the evening after dinner a grand slam ping-pong tournament developed, sparking a lively debate as to how far the use of powers was legitimate: John couldn’t summon the winds without causing irreparable damage to the whole station, so that was alright, but Aradia’s ability to stop her opponents’ shots mid-flight caused a certain amount of protest. Eventually, to no-one’s surprise, the final came down to Terezi (who had an uncanny facility for working out where the ball was going to go before it got there) versus Dave (who was, even Karkat had to admit, just fast as _Hell_ ). This last epic battle took so long that the other trolls all gave up and drifted away to bed. When Terezi finally triumphed, with a vicious backspin under Dave’s guard, the only spectators left were Rose, John, and Jade.

Rose stretched and yawned ostentatiously. “Goodness, it’s late. I’m heading to bed. Coming, Jade?”

“Mmm, I’m really sleepy!” said Jade, not sounding sleepy in the least. “Let’s go. Well done, Terezi, you were awesome!”

Terezi bowed solemnly.

“Yeah, I think I’m off too,” said John. “See you guys in the morning!”

“I’ll be along in a bit, John,” said Dave. “Just gonna finish this beer.”

“It’s cool, take your time!”

Sparing a swift glance to check that the laptop was where she had left it, Rose headed upstairs in Jade’s chattering wake.

* * *

The next morning, as she tugged her dressing-gown tighter and sat down on the sofa, she realised with a slight shock that she was nervous. She hadn’t felt like this since her first ever communications with Dave, when they’d both been children. Before discovering Pesterchum, they had relied entirely on E-mail, and every few days there would be another scarlet screed waiting in her inbox when she logged on. In time, she’d learnt to recognise the tiny knot that formed in her stomach as the loading bar crawled across the screen, to dissolve into disappointment or into joy according to whether the topmost entry in the From: column read _dave strider._

She opened _Complacency2_ and scrolled down – a fair way, now. Then she permitted herself a grin.

 _

Violetta smiled.

_

 _* * *_

 _shaggy 2 dope sat in the tavern – the other tavern, not the one hed left looking like a fucking abattoir, even this piece of shit village had more than one tavern – and looked at the crazy magic girl. she was pretty goddamn weird. she was dressed like shed been on her way to some kind of terrible renfaire but then shed changed her mind and gone to a goth night instead. she kept using really long words like she hoped he didnt know what they meant and might be impressed in some retarded way, though it took a hell of a lot more than casually dropping ‘autochthonous’ into a drinks order to impress the dopemeister. yeah thats right fuck you i can spell autochthonous. she clearly thought she was hells of smart. and i mean, okay, she was pretty smart. but whatever. luckily shed bought his bullshit story about past crimes and atoning and stuff, although shaggy, which was totally his real name, actually just travelled around being righteous and fucking peoples shit up because he was a badass of mythic proportions, and thats what badasses do, you know. i mean its not like youre going to get all that many opportunities to be badass if you just settle down in some hamlet in the ass end of nowhere and farm sheep all fucking day before going peacefully to sleep in a bed made entirely out of lice next to your wife, who looks like a horse and has diseases._

 _this chick was pretty easy to look at though. she had almost no tits, which was kind of a shame, but meh. shaggy could adapt._

 _he was just about to break out some of his legendary moves when TH3R3 W4S 4 LOUD NO1S3 FROM TH3 STR33T, 4S OF 4 NUMB3R OF P3OPL3 B31NG M3SS1LY K1LL3D!_

 _oh my god are you serious_

 _said shaggy_

 _SSHHH SSHHH G3T OUT OF TH3 W4Y. S41D 4 VO1C3 1N SH4GGY’S H34D. TH3 DOOR BURST OP3N 4ND 4 B34UT1FUL BUT D34DLY YOUNG WOM4N W1TH 4 SWORD STROD3 1NS1D3, M4K1NG 4LL TH3 P4TRONS STOP 4ND ST4R3!_

 _shaggy felt he should clarify that ‘beautiful’ here was kinda subjective, i mean were not talking helen of fucking troy, this girl basically looked like someone drew teeth on a box of elbows._

 _BUT TH3N SH4GGY W4S 4 FUCK1NG 1D1OT WHO WOULDN’T KNOW B34UT1FUL 1F 1T L1CK3D H1S F4C3, SO H1S DUB1OUS T3ST1MONY N33D TROUBL3 US NO LONG3R._

 _look for christs sake at least drop the typing quirk, this shit is fucking transparent, unlike you she isnt actually completely fucking blind_

 _DON’T B3 R1D1CULOUS! M4NY GR34T WORKS OF 34RTH L1T3R4TUR3 H4V3 US3D NONST4ND4RD TYPOGR4PHY TO 4CH13V3 N4RR4T1V3 3FF3CTS._

 _name one_

 _TH4T T3RR1BL3 BOOK YOU L3NT M3 4BOUT TH3 HOUS3 TH4T 34TS P3OPL3._

 _jesus, fine, just write the fucking story, im only going to go back and delete all of this anyways_

 _“YOU MUST BOTH COM3 W1TH M3,” S41D TH3 STR4NG3R CR1SPLY. “YOUR L1V3S 4R3 1N D4NG3R. 1T W4S FORTUN4T3 TH4T 1 H4PP3N3D BY, OR TH3 W1CK3D D1LDO G4NG M1GHT H4V3 CL41M3D TWO MOR3 V1CT1MS.”_

 _augh_

 _you dont even know what a dildo is do you_

 _4PP4R3NTLY 1T 1S SOM3 SORT OF H1STOR1C4L 34RTH W34PON 4ND TH4T 1S 4LL 1 N33D TO KNOW! 4NYW4Y. “MYST3R1OUS SWORDSWOM4N,” S41D V1OL3TT4, “1 F1ND MYS3LF 1RR3S1ST1BLY 4TTR4CT3D TO YOU.”_

 _“4S DO 1,” 4DM1TT3D SH4GGY. “PL34S3, WH4T 1S YOUR N4M3?”_

 _“DO NOT WORRY, TH1S H4PP3NS 4 LOT. 1T 1S S1MPLY TH3 PR1C3 1 4M F4T3D TO P4Y FOR MY 3XTR3M3 HOTN3SS. MY N4M3 1S JUD1C14TOR R3DGL4R3 4ND 1 4M 4LL TH4T ST4NDS B3TW33N TH1S TOWN 4ND L4WL3SS 4N4RCHY. COM3 WITH M3 1F YOU W4NT TO L1V3.”_

 _TH3 THR33SOM3_

 _trio_

 _\- F1N3, TR1O, L3FT TH3 T4V3RN. 1MM3D14T3LY TH3Y W3R3 4TT4CK3D BY N34RLY S3V3N HUNDR3D D1LDO W13LD1NG BR1G4NDS, 4LL OF WHOM R3DGL4R3 K1LL3D 1N BRUT4L 4ND 1NV3NT1V3 W4YS._

 _shaggy and violetta were too busy laughing._

 _TH3Y S4DDL3D HOOFB34STS 4ND ROD3 H1GH 1NTO TH3 H1LLS UNT1L TH3Y C4M3 TO 4N OLD STON3 TOW3R. “TH1S 1S MY H1V3,” 4NNOUNC3D R3DGL4R3 PROUDLY. “W3 W1LL B3 S4F3 H3R3 FOR TON1GHT. NO CR1M1N4L WOULD D4R3 TO 4PPRO4CH, 4S 1T 1S GU4RD3D BY F3ROC1OUS DR4GONS.”_

 _“the dragon i took down earlier on was a piece of shit” said shaggy sceptically._

 _“TH4T W4S NOT 4 TRU3 DR4GON,” R3PL13D R3DGL4R3 W1TH 4 P1TY1NG SH4K3 OF TH3 H34D. “TH4T W4S B4S1C4LLY JUST 4N 4NGRY G3CKO. TH3 F33BL3ST OF W1GGL3RS COULD H4V3 K1CK3D 1T TO D34TH. MY DR4GONS 4R3 TH3 S1Z3 OF C4STL3S 4ND BR34TH3 L1GHTN1NG TH4T 1S 4LSO ON F1R3.”_

 _TH3Y 4LL W3NT 1NTO TH3 TOW3R. “1’M 4FR41D TH3R3 1S ONLY ON3 B3D,” S41D R3DGL4R3 4POLOG3T1C4LLY, UNF4ST3N1NG H3R J3RK1N. “1 HOP3 TH4T 1S 4LR1GHT W1TH 3V3RYON3.”_

Rose finished reading and realised her cheeks felt strangely hot. She made herself another cup of Lapsang while her breathing slowed back to normal and she planned her next move. Then she sat down on the sofa and cracked her knuckles determinedly.

 _

Violetta lay sleepily in the lamplight on their hostess’ four-poster, warm and naked under soft woollen blankets, and watched her new allies move around the room. They made a fascinating pair. Both obviously dangerous, although sadly constrained by their reliance upon the blunt ontological certainties of steel and leather rather than the infinite and dizzying subtleties of the magickal arts; both tough, yet somehow brittle; both fancying themselves fortified behind impenetrable walls of black iron and rigid anger, safe and invisible to passers-by. To one of Violetta’s capabilities they might as well have hidden behind glass. Judiciator Redglare – so sharp, so quick in her movements, her every gesture or turn of phrase wielded like a scalpel, striking out at a world that had failed to understand her by understanding it better than it did itself. She was very beautiful, but Violetta suspected she had not been told as much, at least not often. Women brought up to see themselves as beautiful had an openness, a confidence in the way their heads turned or their eyelashes flickered. Redglare was locked away, tight and bristling. It was a great pity. Violetta idly contemplated how satisfying it would be to kiss her eyes and her throat until she unfolded.

_

 _And then there was Shaggy, which could not, conceivably, be his real name. And the fact itself told one everything. A man so used to ducking out of sight behind witticisms and half-truths that even his name was a smirk. He was infuriating, no doubt; Violetta had only known him for a day and already she could see the appeal of strangling him. But, on balance, there were better uses to which her slender hands might be put. Something in him burnt like a flame, and as he stood across the room, stripped to the waist, attending minutely to his sword’s blade with an oiled rag, she could feel its heat on her face. His pale skin gleamed with sweat and cried out to be touched. Here was a man who would fight until there was no more blood in his body, and still use his dying breath for one last joke. Here was a man who would never lower his defences, never drop his guard, and yet who wanted more than anything to be overrun, to have his walls shattered and his towers tumbled like sand and pebbles on a beach, to be swept away and under by the tide. His dark glasses, she realised now, were not armour against an uncaring world; they were intended to prevent what was inside from spilling out of him like firelight round a locked door._

 _The two of them were natural partners. But, left in a room together, they would butt heads until they both fell unconscious. They would jockey for control of every sentence in their narrative. Each card either played would be denounced as deception by the other. It would be war to the last man, neither able to give an inch of ground, to hoist a white flag above a crumbling parapet. But with an intermediary..._

 _Violetta smiled, and pulled the covers a little further up around her chin, and waited._

Rose went off to have a shower.

* * *

The next few hours seemed to crawl by. There were energetic days when everyone was focused and found jobs to do and there was much back-slapping and mutual encouragement, and then there were lacklustre days when everyone just sloped around looking listless and defeated, days when it seemed especially obvious that they were all trapped on a ruined chunk of space station drifting through cold and infinite blackness. It was clear by breakfast that today would belong to the second category. Only John, as always, ploughed on with the unstoppable, impregnable optimism of a happy bulldozer. Rose knitted most of a scarf, did the washing up, and spent an unpleasant hour crawling around some sooty access tunnels looking for a back-up generator Sollux had seen mentioned in a diagnostics array.

After dinner they all watched _Con Air_ again. Everyone knew it off by heart, but it was a comforting totem. Rose went up to bed afterwards, leaving Dave, Terezi, John, and Sollux playing cards round the table. As she brushed her teeth and climbed under the covers the numbers in the darkness read 23:13.

But she could not sleep. For a long time she lay on her back, straining to listen through the alarming creaks and groans of the bulkheads around her for sounds of activity from downstairs. At first she could pick up the distant murmur of voices and occasional laughter. Then there was an interval of footsteps going to and fro, clanking along gantries and clattering up metal staircases. Then there was silence, but for the endless background discord of the station’s beams and panels shifting under unknown strains.

Rose rolled over and closed her eyes. A little bit later she rolled the other way and opened them again. 00:42. Less than five hours now until she could go down and check. But what if there was nothing there? What if Dave and Terezi had gone off to bed along with the others, chatting and laughing, leaving the laptop cold and forgotten in its corner? What if she fired up _Complacency2_ tomorrow morning with pounding heart and the last words on the screen were ones she herself had written? And she had to wait while another day, another stupid day of chores and jokes and meals and pointless conversations, dragged itself past with the slow agony of a wounded animal?

She could not bear it. If there was nothing more to find, she had to know that _now_. She could not lie twitching in this cheerless metal womb for another five hours of dark anticipation. She had to be sure, and then she could sleep. Jade’s breathing was deep and slow and peaceful. The room was pitch black, but there was almost no furniture to impede her progress. Rose swung her legs out of bed, shuddering as her bare feet clung to the cold steel, feeling her heat leak down and dissipate into the station’s bones. She did not bother with the dressing-gown; the air was chilly but bearable, and the long T-shirt she wore at night came midway down her thighs and was perfectly decent. If she met someone she would just say she’d woken up hungry and needed a snack.

The hiss of the door’s hydraulics sounded shatteringly loud, but Rose knew this was nerves, and Jade could sleep through an artillery barrage anyway. The gangways had emergency lighting which they’d never figured out how to switch off, so she was not forced to shuffle along blindly to the head of the stairs. Within a minute she was down in the common area. Most of this lay in darkness, but a couple of screens high up on a wall were still spilling rippling strings of meaningless red and green digits into the ether, and by their diffuse and glimmering light she could make out basic shapes rendered looming and unearthly: the table, the counters, the sofa. And, on the sofa, just as she had last seen it, the flat black oblong that was her laptop.

Rose steeled herself for disappointment. It was only a game, and she could not expect too much. Dave and Terezi had probably laughed themselves stupid the previous night, flushed and a little drunk from their ping-pong showdown, but had forgotten the whole thing today and moved on to other distractions. In weeks or months to come they might hark back: _hey tz, d’you remember that evening we hijacked Rose’s shitty wizard fic and wrote all that garbage? D’you think she even bothered to read it all?_ Just because she wanted the story to continue did not mean they felt any similar investment. She must not be silly about it.

She’d almost reached the sofa when she heard a rustle and sensed quick movement behind her and suddenly her elbows were pinned against her sides and someone was squashed close against her back. She could feel the warm pressure of ribs rising and falling, and hot breath tickling her ear, stirring the hairs tucked behind it. She realised she was being held, tight, and the arms locked together around her stomach were familiar.

The shadows to the right of the sofa stirred and a jagged silhouette – _no h, you see, everyone always forgets the h_ – resolved itself into Terezi, her shades glinting in the digital wash, her grin one of deep and fanged satisfaction.

“You see, coolkid?” she said triumphantly. “The perfect trap – the trap of a true Legislacerator – is one the target is quite literally unable to resist.”

The boy holding Rose did not speak. He was breathing hard. She tried not to do the same.

“Ms Lalonde,” said Terezi, smirking. “You’re in breach of curfew.”

“There isn’t a curfew,” Rose pointed out reasonably.

“Ssshhhhh,” said Terezi. “There is now. I just instated it. Leaving one’s respiteblock after midnight now has... serious consequences.”

“Aren’t you both therefore _also_ in breach of curfew?”

“We,” said Terezi grandly, “are officers of the law. We have a responsibility to patrol this station during the hours of darkness and keep watch for malefactors such as yourself.”

“Can I see your badges, please?”

Terezi fished in a pocket, drew out a small round metal object, and flashed it briefly between two fingers.

“That’s the cap off a bottle of cheap lager.”

“Neophyte Strider, take note: subject was obstreperous during arrest and asked persnickety questions! You’re only making it worse for yourself, Ms Lalonde.”

Rose sighed despairingly. “Against legal machinery as fair and transparent as this I have no defence. It’s a fair cop, Officer, but society’s to blame. I can only throw myself on the mercy of the court.”

“The court,” said Terezi softly, stepping closer, “has no mercy.”

She leaned in and up and kissed Rose fiercely on the mouth, taking her lower lip between pointed teeth and biting down just hard enough to hurt. A cool hand found its way onto the flesh of Rose’s thigh, below the hem of her nightshirt, and began to slide upwards as a long slim tongue snaked into her mouth. Rose closed her eyes and relaxed happily into Dave’s arms, stretching one hand back to where she could already feel him hardening against her through the material of his jeans and the thin cotton of the T-shirt, freeing the other from his hold to push it up under Terezi’s unruly black hair and stroke the downy skin along the nape of her neck.

“I fucking love collaborative fiction,” said Dave hoarsely.

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is affectionately dedicated to cephied_variable and urbanAnchorite, who gave me helpful feedback on an original draft, and wisely convinced me to make a few refinements (such as getting rid of the last two thousand words because they were ‘just too inexcusably filthy’).


End file.
